Avocado Prices Analysis

by Mercy Nyambura Kariuki

Introduction

It is a well known fact that Millenials LOVE Avocado Toast. It's also a well known fact that all Millenials live in their parents basements.

Clearly, they aren't buying home because they are buying too much Avocado Toast!

But maybe there's hope… If a Millenial could find a city with cheap avocados, they could live out the Millenial American Dream.

Content

This data was downloaded from the Hass Avocado Board website in May of 2018 & compiled into a single CSV. Here's how the Hass Avocado Board describes the data on their website:

The table below represents weekly 2018 retail scan data for National retail volume (units) and price. Retail scan data comes directly from retailers’ cash registers based on actual retail sales of Hass avocados. Starting in 2013, the table below reflects an expanded, multi-outlet retail data set. Multi-outlet reporting includes an aggregation of the following channels: grocery, mass, club, drug, dollar and military. The Average Price (of avocados) in the table reflects a per unit (per avocado) cost, even when multiple units (avocados) are sold in bags. The Product Lookup codes (PLU’s) in the table are only for Hass avocados. Other varieties of avocados (e.g. greenskins) are not included in this table.

Some relevant columns in the dataset:

  • Date - The date of the observation
  • AveragePrice - the average price of a single avocado
  • type - conventional or organic
  • year - the year sold
  • Region - the city or region of the observation
  • Total Volume - Total number of avocados sold
  • 4046 - Total number of avocados with Product Lookup codes (PLU's) 4046 sold
  • 4225 - Total number of avocados with Product Lookup codes (PLU's) 4225 sold
  • 4770 - Total number of avocados with Product Lookup codes (PLU's) 4770 sold

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the Hass Avocado Board for sharing this data!!

Inspiration

In which cities can millenials have their avocado toast AND buy a home?

Was the Avocadopocalypse of 2017 real?

  • 1. Data Aquisition
  • 2. Data Preprocessing
  • 3. ExploratoryDataAnalysis
  • 4. Research Results
  • Gather Data

    Let's take a closer look at the information received.

    There are 14 columns in the table. There are three data types: non-null object (3 columns), non-null float64 (9 columns) and non-null int64 (2 columns).

    Stage 2: Data Preprocessing

    There are two types of avocados sold:

    • conventional
    • organic

    These sales are a record from the year 2015 - 2018 among 54 regions.

    Let's split the Date Column

    Stage 3. Exploratory data analysis

    Let's Visualize these correlations

    Type

    Of the 18249 avocado sales, 9126 are Non-conventional avocados and 9123 are organic. Both avocado types contibute to 50% of the revenue with a slight difference of 0.02%.

    Year of Sales

    Let's look at yearly total avocado sales

    2017 had the highest sales with 5722 avocados sold (31.4%) followed by 2016 which contributed to 30.8% of the total sales. 2015 is the third with 5615 sales. This is 1 avocado less than 2016. 2018 has the lowest counts with 1296 sales (7.1%)

    Let's see the total sales made per year by avocado

    2017 is the leading year with the highest sales in both avocado types while 2018 recorded the lowest sales in conventional and organic avocado types

    Let's look at the the monthly sales

    The month of January has the highest sales of 1944 followed by March (1836). June, however, has the lowest sales of 1294

    Price Analysis

    Average price of avocados over the years for different types

    Organic Type has a higher average price while Conventional type is more affordable.

    It's only in 2015 and 2015 that the average price of the conventional type are the same. For the organic type, 2015 has a higher average price than in 2016.

    Average prices by type over the years

    From 2016 to 2018, both types have a similar price trend where there is an increase in average price from 2016 to 2017 then decreased in 2018.

    However, from 2015 to 2016, there is a decrease in the average price for the organic type while there was a slight increas with the conventional type

    Region

    The top 3 states have the highest average prices are San Francisco, New York and Hartford Spring Field

    Variation in Conventional avocado prices across different cities

    2017 has the highest average in all the regions

    Variation in Organic avocado prices across different cities

    In contrary to what we've observed with conventional avocado type, the organic avocado type data shows that 2017 isn't consistent at being the leading average price across all regions; only 48% of the regions, followed by 36% of the regions that have 2015 with the highest average price. 6% of the regions have 2016 with the highest average price.

    10% of the regions have 2018 with the highest average price.

    Let's group these regions by global region:

    Average Price by Global Region

    Price Elasticity

    Comparing prices to demand over time shows negative correlations. Higher prices in September correlate with less Volume over the same season. Lower prices below median correlate with higher demand. Prices are generally similar across all regions and time. Regions differ considerably in value because of their sizes, but the distribution appears consistent within a 95\% confidence interval.